Lately, it seems the loudest political opinions are devoid of nuance or historical context. It takes an especially intelligent writer to capture a political moment and reframe it coherently, without sacrificing its complexity.
Rachel Kushner has repeatedly risen to this challenge. Her second novel, The Flamethrowers, revived an Italian leftist movement from the 1970s, and her new book about the insurgent left in France, among other things, was recently long listed for the Man Booker Prize (the winner will be announced in November 2024). Kushner’s Creation Lake is a cerebral spy novel written from the perspective of a jaded secret agent who we come to know only by her alias, Sadie Smith. By way of background, we learn that Sadie has a knack for seduction and double dealing. Though ruthlessly effective, these methods cost her her job with the FBI after she is found guilty of entrapment. Rather than giving up on her career, she becomes a mercenary for shadowy, private interests. She relocates to France and accepts a job with a powerful employer who takes pains to remain anonymous, aside from a few clues suggesting they sought her out for her skill at infiltrating left wing activist groups.
The book opens with Sadie seducing a needy film director named Lucien in order to get closer to her real target—Pascal Balmy, Lucien’s close friend and the leader of Le Moulin, a communist insurgent group suspected of eco terrorism in a rural region of France called the Guyenne. Sadie shows a cut throat mindset as she shrewdly manipulates Lucien into providing the ideal base of operations for her secret mission. Oblivious to her true identity, Lucien absconds to direct a documentary in the city while Sadie moves into his family’s vacant country estate in the Guyenne. She outfits the creepy, isolated mansion with satellite internet, sophisticated surveillance equipment, and a small arsenal of firearms. Even more conveniently, Lucien arranges for her to take a job with Le Moulin as a translator of their political tracts.
Sadie passes Pascal’s peremptory interview on the strength of Lucien’s character reference, and in no time she is working long hours on Le Moulinards’ farm, holed up in the group’s library alongside Pascal and his inner circle. She wins over suspicious comrades by playing dumb and forging strategic alliances with the outcasts and misanthropes among them. The leaders of Le Moulin are none the wiser. As time passes, Sadie feeds her employer intelligence gathered from Pascal and a stream of intercepted emails from the commune’s intellectual figurehead, the itinerant philosopher Bruno Lacombe.
Without ever breaking character, Kushner retells Bruno’s emails from Sadie’s perspective, deftly maintaining the first person point of view while inviting us into the eccentric mind of the terrorist group’s absent mentor. Bruno’s messages to Pascal are thoughtful and intelligent, well versed in anthropology and archeology. We feel ourselves falling under Bruno’s spell, just as Sadie does. In one message, he tells the story of his daughter’s death in a tragic farm accident. The tale humanizes Bruno, casting him in a flawed light and lending his favorite topics—Neanderthals, homo sapiens, and the ancient origins of our species—a haunted and obsessive quality. In this respect, Creation Lake takes its cue from the great epistolary and confessional novels of the 19th century. I was reminded of gothic classics like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and feverishly impassioned, first-person narratives like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
But in the end, Creation Lake is a spy novel, and for the most part, Kushner sustains the brisk pacing and plot-heavy hallmarks of a good spy novel. She held my attention and kept me wanting more, at least until the overly tidy and anticlimactic climax. In that scene, Kushner chooses to eliminate Sadie’s target, an unpopular government functionary, via a deus ex machina mechanism involving a sudden cascade of huge logs. The bureaucrat’s accidental death relieves Sadie of the need to assassinate him herself, neatly absolving her of any moral responsibility and quite conveniently ending Sadie’s mission in the Guyenne without requiring much sacrifice or effort on her part.
Kushner’s narrator consistently displays an audacious, defiant self-assurance bordering on hubris. For a typical, modern reader (read jaded), such overconfidence practically guarantees doom and disaster. But the expected disaster never arrives. Without spoiling the ending, I will go as far as to say that Sadie Smith disappears, while Kushner’s narrator is born again. Our prideful protagonist experiences an unexpected renewal, a sloughing off of vice—she gives up alcohol and the internet, both crutches that she had until then relied on—and finally, in a muted coda at the end of the book, chooses a new occupation that echoes Bruno’s self-imposed banishment to his philosopher’s cave.
I kept waiting for Sadie’s supreme confidence to shatter into a thousand pieces, like a dropped mirror, convinced that her assassination plan would go horribly awry, but Kushner continually dashed my expectations by delivering exactly what Sadie needed for her plan to progress according to schedule. She brazenly threatens Lucien’s uncle and ruins his reputation, pits fellow activists against one another, recruits co-conspirators, pursues a reckless affair with a member of the commune, and easily gets away with all of it. In this respect, Kushner shows an admirable disdain for the old literary adage, “kill your darlings.”
Kushner does take the easy way out sometimes. At one point, a waitress at the local cafe is revealed to be Bruno’s surviving daughter, but the camera never focuses on her, and ultimately, her sole purpose is to lead Sadie to her father’s secret cave. The pitiful boyfriend, Lucien, waits patiently in the wings, foolishly anticipating his reuniting with Sadie, only to conveniently fade away into an affair of his own near the end of the book, letting Sadie off the hook. She is never forced to reckon with her deception of Lucien or other unwitting boyfriends from past missions. In another instance, Sadie is exposed for her impulsive affair with a Moulinard named Rene but faces few meaningful consequences aside from getting the cold shoulder from Rene’s wife.
For the most part, Bruno’s paraphrased missives counterbalance such weaknesses by breaking up the linear plot and injecting it with verve and sparkling intellect. In one of his intercepted emails, Bruno describes the altered consciousness that develops from more than a decade living in hidden, underground caves:
“I hear people, he said, whose voices are eternal in this underground world, which is all planes of time on a single plane. Here on earth is another earth, he said, a different reality, no less real. It has different rules… In my cave, he said, under my cave, welling up from deeper passages, I hear so many things. Not just the drip of water. I hear voices. People talking. Sometimes it’s in French, sometimes Occitan, sounds of which I cannot understand a word, but I know that what I hear is humans, it is human talk.”
The emails bely his growing sympathy for a unique brand of spiritual transcendentalism. As Bruno’s views drift toward mysticism, Kushner’s tone grows downright incantatory, ecstatic, and revelatory.
Indeed, at times Kushner allows herself to be swept joyfully down a whitewater river of her own making. The world of Creation Lake is a haven for complex and multifaceted ideas, one that carries a special appeal for Sadie and Pascal and perhaps even the author herself.
FICTION
by Rachel Kushner
Scribner Book Company
Published on September 3, 2024
